UPA’s living stories

The word “documentary” can refer not only to cinema, but also to theater. This genre is called verbatim (“word for word” in Latin). Although not new in Ukraine, it is still unusual to ordinary audiences. Verbatim theater shows consist of monologues and dialogues of real people performed by actors. These productions are usually based on interviews. Actors reproduce all the particularities of the characters’ pronunciation and repeat the mistakes and slips made. Documentary theater seems to avoid interpreting the events being shown and fully entrust this function to the spectator.

It is the verbatim genre that the Lviv-based Mystetsky Prostir (Art Space) studio chose when they decided to tell about the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in their production. In their opinion, this genre allows avoiding slogans and officialism which has pervaded this topic lately in Western Ukraine. The play’s author and stage director Uliana Moroz had heard dozens-of-hours-long reminiscences and interviews and, having selected a few fragments, put them together without any additional editing, as if they were Lego components, to make the play. The production is also particular in that it engages not only professional, but also amateur actors. This week the documentary drama 20-Year-Olds, dedicated to the 71st anniversary of the formation of the UPA, was shown for the first time in Kyiv – at the Ukrainian Museum of Book and Book Printing.

The 20-Year-Olds traces the life stories of UPA fighters Panteleimon Blazhun, Maria Duzha, Roman Karychort, Yaroslava Menkush, Liubomyr and Daria Poliuha, Stepan Rodamansky, and Dmytro Khomyn, with most of the materials furnished by the Territory of Terror museum.

“We hit upon this idea, when it occurred to us after one of the UPA soirees that we had been repeatedly saying the same thing – they are heroes who had sacrificed so much for our future. It is true, of course. But we forget a detail: they were ordinary young and inexperienced boys and girls,” says Khrystyna KRYVDYK, a sociologist by profession, who played Daria Poliuha, OUN member and longtime prisoner. “Acting in the verbatim genre is rather specific. Usually, one author writes a play which reproduces the feelings of one individual. It is far more difficult to work on a documentary drama, for you have to reincarnate as not a fictional character but a living person who is telling his or her story. You are given a text and told: ‘Try to copy Ms. Daria.’ As a matter of fact, we showed just a fraction – every character is worth a theatrical play. You know, every time I read the materials, everything churns inside me – these stories really go through me. Interestingly, the people who became stage characters visited the theater and then shared their impressions with us. They said the play brought them back to their youth. When I was working on the role, I mostly used the video rather than the text, for I tried to copy the character’s language and gestures. Naturally, I could not help adding something because I was always thinking what I would have done if I had been her. But still the main goal was to reproduce direct speech as truly as possible – it is the inner sense of a documentary drama.”

Stark stage settings, a theater of shadows, singing to the guitar, and projecting photographs are the only artistic means that were to convince the audience that they see 20-year-old UPA fighters who are telling about woodland battles, interrogations, deportations, and even about the romantic feelings that were roused in spite of all hardships.

“Verbatim is an extremely difficult genre,” admits Roman KRYVDYK, an actor at Lviv’s First Ukrainian Theater for Children and Youth, who played Liubomyr Poliuha, Roman Shukhevych’s bodyguard. “By the very nature of their trade, an actor or an actress would always like to ‘add’ something, make the character more colorful, and ‘dabble at theater.’ But the ultimate goal of a documentary drama is to eschew this. You must play with sort of a ‘cold’ passion to cause the spectator to want to be in the character’s place. The production’s dramatic form seems to be kept within the traditional framework – the beginning, the plot, the culmination, and the end, – but some conventionality still remains. We wanted to emphasize that the spectator watches an interview, not our own thoughts. It is a blend of different stage art theories – elements of Stanislavsky’s system, the ritual theater, etc. Our production is a document that found itself in the confines of the word, light, and song. Working on this is a complicated and nonstop process. I cannot say there is a rigid pattern which we follow every time. It would be more correct to say that we are continuously searching. For instance, we intend to tear down the ‘fourth wall’ to bring the audience into play, too. Besides, the stage cast is always changing.

“It is no mere chance that the UPA topic was chosen – there are some who often try to manipulate this historical period. This subject is always the talk of the town and has already become hackneyed to some extent. Something of the kind is also occurring with the oeuvre of Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, and Ivan Franko. In my view, it is a dangerous trend, for it discredits the national idea, without which no country can resist today’s global influences. We tried to avoid this. It would be also interesting for me personally to work with the materials that reproduce the views of the other participants in that war – the Germans, Poles, and Soviet partisans. I found it pleasant and, at the same time, a little strange to communicate with the people I was to play. I was stunned with their serene eyes and absence of hatred in spite of all the hardships and cruelties they had to go through. Yet I don’t think they would still be living if there were hatred in their eyes.”